Chandigarh, May 14 -- The City Beautiful improved its Class 12 pass percentage to 90.91% this year, up from 90.24% in 2024, as per the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) results declared on Tuesday. However, Chandigarh still trailed behind its neighbouring states and Union territories (UTs), ranking lower than Punjab (92.47%), Haryana (91.04%), Himachal Pradesh (92.76%) and Jammu & Kashmir (94.75%). It performed better than only Ladakh (52.46%), the worst scorer in the entire country. Even among UTs, Chandigarh fared worse than most, including Delhi that had a pass percentage of 95.23%. In fact, only Puducherry (90.39%) and Ladakh ranked lower than Chandigarh among all UTs. Chandigarh joined the national trend of girls outperforming boys-with girls securing a 93.05% pass percentage against 88.95% for boys. The Chandigarh region, which includes Punjab, Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh, recorded an overall pass percentage of 91.61%, while the Panchkula region, covering Haryana and Himachal, stood at 91.17%. Nationally, Chandigarh region secured the seventh position while Panchkula region ranked eighth. Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh, recorded the highest pass percentage at 99.6%, followed by Trivandrum, Kerala, at 99.32%. Officials attributed the gap in Chandigarh's performance to no local education board while other states had state-level education boards. "Students with a lower academic aptitude tend to pick state board schools over CBSE schools, while Chandigarh has only CBSE schools. This makes the comparison skewed," said officials. Chandigarh director of school education Harsuhinderpal Singh Brar congratulated students for their hard work that was reflected in the results. "But in every accomplishment, there's room for improvement. We will review the performance and take corrective steps to ensure that children get the best education and perform to the best of their ability," he said. Brar further shared that this was the first batch where all Class-10 passouts from government schools were provided admission in Class 11, regardless of marks. This had reduced dropouts and given higher education opportunity to even children who scored less in Class 10. Brar said while government schools may have missed out on students with higher merit, their emphasis was on giving every child the right to appear in Class 12 exams. "Despite this, we improved our result. That's a positive sign and we will further plan how to improve our results next year," he added. A total of 102 schools from Chandigarh participated in the Class 12 CBSE exams, with 46 exam centres across the city. Nationwide, 17.87 lakh students appeared for the exams held from February 15 to April 4....